


names are the consequences of things

by tnevmucric



Category: Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: Akechi Goro Has A Palace, M/M, POV First Person, set before interrogation room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-09-27 04:44:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17155556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tnevmucric/pseuds/tnevmucric
Summary: i have awoken in a field of wildflowers





	names are the consequences of things

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things of significance. I want to float seas of crowds and dig my heels into the heartless coasts created by a sweating summer and defeatless horror. Ideally, in the perfect world, I can't feel a thing. I can't feel a thing.

By chance or divine fate, out of the night which clouds me (as black as it is painted), I fall into the clutch of inadvertent irony. The air is thick with a smell I cannot describe and my toes curl in my socks; I am leant back in a lounge, with my face to a sky I do not recognise, and the sun shines as if it's our first meeting. _Hello, menace of years. Have you come to take my age away?_

My shoulders and neck creak to attention as I sit up. My fingers recognise the leather before my eyes do and my throat closes in on itself.  He sits across from me with his glasses perched on his nose and his fingers tapping out a rhythm on his cheek. He's thinking about his next move, trying to remember the rules of the game and fiddling with one of my pieces in his other hand. I look to my left.

I have awoken in a field of wildflowers.

My eyes twitch as they dawdle to him again. I have never seen him realistically, I realise too late. His hair is not so dark and the bags under his eyes should curve a semi-circle above his cheek, not cease to exist altogether. His cuticles are always raw-looking and he never wears lipbalm, yet here there are no cracks to be seen.

Treacherously hidden behind a glossed pink, and the loveliest tints of rose, he dares to smile at me, dares to lean into my space. It is debauching and corruptive and I am afraid if he touches me, I will die a little death. I want to taste every tastebud within his mouth. I want to lick him clean.

The breeze reminds me of early mornings in autumn. Perwinkle petals brush across the table and bump into the exaggerated curls of his hair: _forget me not_ , they exhale.

He kicks my foot, languid and unexpressed.

"Your move."

I _hate_ — I hate the taste of floral foam and the smell of the spray that they use to keep roses alive.

"You look like him", my fingers shake around the chess piece and make the wrong decision. "You don't act like him."

The sound of his bishop sliding across the board is a possessive show of power he bears to my witness. He holds the sound in slow motion and for what feels like minutes, my muscles submit.

"Checkmate", he sweeps the rest of the pieces off the board and begins to place them again, "Play another round?"

"No."

A pawn hovers in his fingertips, he taps it with his nail almost impatiently. "Desire is a fortuitous thing. It is easy to lose control of whatever idea you regard as 'self' with it."

The booth is from Leblanc and I quickly miss that comfort; the coffee bean smell that had ingrained itself in the wood over time and the leather with the scratches of wear and tear (nights under soldered, stained glass). That memory, that impression is where immortality lies, I think.

"I've never seen this place before." He clicks his tongue, resuming to place the pieces back on the board again.

"It's not what you expected?"

"The table, maybe", I don't share the reminiscent and now resounding ache it leaves under my skin. "I get allergies in spring. I hate flowers."

He is quiet and dissuading, pursing his lips in thought like apathy in its highest: something so quiet and simple.

"It's only a reflection of what you know. Why does it bother you? Play another game with me."

"I'd rather not."

As if I had blinked, and without my blinking at all, his eyes are an indescribable yellow. Painstakingly paranoid and unnerving, he has the eyes of an owl.

"Do you like to be liked?"

The breeze returns harsher than before and I splutter petals away from my eyes. Like baby's-breath, they irritate.

"What?"

"It's a question", his nonchalance returns, "of course, everyone does. It's nice, it gives us a short amount of purpose. But what about you?"

There are endless ways to answer and in my own faults I find none. "I don't see how that applies to the topic."

He pauses and smiles again, like he's discovered a secret. The slow stretch of it churns my stomach and I envy what he hides.

"You look just like him", I try, "is that the point?" I am as weak as my life's reasoning. He looks behind me— the barest inch to the right.

"The train's coming."

"What-"

Gravity is pulled from beneath our feet and I am flung forwards with a force that shatters my eardrums. Freezing air suddenly hits my skin and my feet stumble on a new ground— his hands clasp over my ears and pull me upwards: I cough dust.

He is so warm.

A disgusting feeling crawls into my throat and I pull away, just in time to watch the blinking train carriage dissapear to nowhere. The riverside is undisturbed and passerby act as though nothing happened. There aren't any train tracks across the bridge and faintly, I recognise the moon's light.

"How-"

"Distortion isn't quite real, remember", he leans against the railing stiffly. "It's a place between mind and matter. Your mind. It's beautiful, and the markets radiate a warmth which makes you feel safe. You treasure it. You enjoyed the time you spent here."

I could never put into words how I felt staring at the combined glow of wicker lights and heat from far away— I can't even do it now. I can smell the candied peaches and steaming drinks and if I squinted, I'm sure I'd be able to see footprints from a lifetime ago. I'd be able to remember that continuing glow he stole and carried like a badge. I felt stolen; my heart misscarried its purpose and dropped into my stomach. He had held my hand.

"Why did you choose to go down this path?", the fake asks. I feel my lips twist involuntarily. It seems I have no control of my body in this world; no abundance of practiced form to maintain or take from. Just... whatever I begun with. Whatever remained.

"I didn't choose to-"

"No, not that", he shakes his head and points back to the markets. "There's a street that would have taken you less time to get back to the station, and yet you chose this path. Why?"

"... I don't remember."

Briefly, I let myself watch the river. My hands have begun to rust and grow blue from the cold: _the one time you don't bring gloves._ I am tired of words. If I overindulge, I forget the feeling.

The water was rushing so fast.

"The desire to feel needed is tied to social nature", he begins, squinting to gauge my reaction, "People want to feel needed, more specifically they want to feel they are an important member of the social climate they relate to. It's a natural feeling which has evolved in humans to ensure they are maintaining a useful role in life."

"Children", he continues, "who grew with a weak bond to their parents and were in a constant state of anxiety... they had to forget their own needs, let alone what they wanted. They even had to forget who they wanted to be in order to survive. Their self-esteem has been so worn down that they need the approval of others, just as they did in childhood. They pay more attention to others feelings and needs than their own and cater to others so they won’t be abandoned or rejected... and yet they can appear completely confident and competent." How pitiable, I think, to have a backstory. "Because they are who others can depend on. They are the problem-solver, the caretaker, the decision-maker and the rescuer. The charmer. They are driven by the need to be loved and accepted, as they never were by their parents."

Blossom petals dissappear in the river bank and my eyes become clouded with frost. Slowly, the lights of the market close down. There are no passerby.

"My mother never touched me."

"Neglect is as much a form of abuse than any other", he closes his eyes like he can actually feel the wind. Like he can feel anything at all. "She killed herself in the bathroom where you brushed your teeth. You didn't want to blame her, so you blamed Shido Masayoshi, the only logical culprit. You focused all of your energy on blaming him."

"He's accountable."

"Everyone's accountable. If I trip down the stairs of the subway, bump into a man and cause him to drop his phone, he will miss the call from his wife and walk in on her three hours later fucking some kid eighteen years younger. The man kills them both out of blind rage- _I am accountable_."

 _Let's come here again_ , he'd said against my hands (chapped lips warming my fingertips), _I haven't seen you smile like this before._

"You're a cognitive version of Akira in my palace", the weight on my tongue makes every word taste like absinthe— _help me, I am hallucinating_. "Why are you trying to... _fix_ me." _I want to crawl into bed with you and forget I know how to breathe. To eat. To die. To sleep._

"Perhaps this is how you see him", I glance over at him and he squints a kind of awkward smile; one that isn't right nor human. "Willing to ignore his own needs in order to those around him, caring enough for that to even be a reality... You envy what you could have been."

I am tired of thinking anymore.

"The sky was patronising and looked like cooling wax on that night", he whispers, "You wanted to beg at his feet. Isn't that how you remember it?"

I desperately skirt around the memory; its touch would surely set me on fire, burn me alive from the inside. I am twisted and tormented within its touch and I dig my heels into the stone ground: he claws at my neck and forces me straight— "Look at me." I want to feel nothing.

"Look at me, Goro."

The gunshot is unplesant and loud and crackles the ice across my eyes. The elevator welcomes me and my skin bleeds under my nails— I press harder into my arm. My suit is uncomfortable and my shoes are three sizes too wide; when the doors open there is no one in the hall, there is no light and no exit and a weight in my hand begins to grow. It wavers my centre of balance.

_The door... the door..._

I hate the smell of gunpowder.

_Click._

In my absence, the flowers have grown. The cognition sits in the booth, swinging feet that aren't his under the table and staring at the chessboard with eyes that don't compliment him. As I get closer, my eyes sting. A layer of dust covers the scene.

I try to say something, try to pull something from my sleeve that would mean anything at all— I find I don't want to, not to him. His curls are out of place and his shadows don't match: the cognition waits expectantly.

"It wouldn't have mattered anyway", I decide, my feet crunching against drying dandelions as I make my way to the booth. "Whether they liked me or not, I was already causing mental shutdowns before they even formed." He moves his knight one space and faces me properly; his knees bump the underside of the table.

"Admitting to a fault early on usually infers lesser consequence."

"What if the fault is murder?"

The sky crackles, as if in shock, and my hand lingers on the edge of the seat. " _What if the fault is murder?_ ", he repeats to me. "I think this chessboard is missing some pieces."

"I never intended to hurt anyone else", I insist, "I don't want to hurt him." My desperation makes me cringe and he shakes his head in a way I do not recognise.

"The thing many people get wrong about an apology is that they self-seek— they make it about themselves whether they know it or not. _'I didnt mean to'_ , _'it wasnt my intention'_...", yellow eyes blink at me, "if the fault is murder, then at the time you had a reasoning, in your life you were damaged by sequential events that date so far back to where you can only blame so many. You believed because of certain circumstance and events that killing those people would get you what you wanted but now you are faced with a gun to your forehead. Point blank. Tell me the difference between yourself and the men you have killed."

I am a monster.

"They did not have the chance to change", my hand slides away from the seat and I feel faint. He stares at me firecely. " _You_ do."

I know I have to force myself to leave, like someone avoiding conviction, to prevent myself from sitting there beside him until I rot away. This perfect caricature of him who, without knowing where or when, makes me admit my great defects.

"I dont know how to stop", I admit with strain. "I have hurt others so badly that recovery seems impossible. By existing, I have caused others damage beyond repair and it _infuriates_ me." I think I am choking. I wouldn't be surprised if I coughed up hydrangea roots.

" _'I've come to break you out'_ ", the cognition suggests gently. "Start there."

A gust of wind scatters the chessboard to the ground and with it, Akira's doppelgänger.  For seconds there is nothing but the blare of a train and the wind whips harder, my throat is filled with thorns.

I look behind me and breathe marigolds.

I have been waiting for so long that vines have begun to feed into my hair. Blue plumbago and jasmine trap my skin to my bones— all of a sudden, I have caught sight of something so wonderfully beautiful in nature that it is probable I forget my entire encounter with the cognition.

God is real, and he wears a crinkled grey uniform. He always wears the same shoes. He breathes my air and without thinking, taps out the rhythm of the trains passing by on his bag strap. I feel the urge to call his name.

There he is. My unending warfare.


End file.
